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For double-fun with a Creationist, ask whether an intelligent designer who sets out to design the coelacanth should make more similar to a salmon or to a sloth. And should a marlin be closer to a hummingbird or hammerhead shark?

daniel - You thought that someone was presenting an argument for evolution? What made you think that?

Ah, I see. A pretty picture and a few sentence fragments is as close to an incontrovertible argument as any Creationist normally gets. I forget sometimes.

No, there are literally tonnes of evidence for evolution but this is just a fascinating, little-known animal. It evolved and its body speaks to that evolution just like all animals do but in the real world, arguments look much different. Sorry for the shock and welcome to DC.

Yeah Yeah Yeah,...forget all this Evolution mumbo jumbo! I bet Creation Scientists are now looking for the tiny banana god made to perfectly fit this fish's tiny little hands! That would be the final proof once and for all for creation! The real question is this;

When my attention is turned to my non-human relatives like these amazing little guys, I really get a sense that all is right with the world. Then, too, I am all the more impressed with our own kind that we have solved the riddle of how species come and go, and our interrelatedness to all living things on this planet. Mankind shares an ancestor with these fish, and despite the hundreds of millions of years and a similar number of generations of progenitors since that common ancestor lived, we still share genes that are almost identical. Using the power that naturalism affords us, we humans discovered this.

For millenia humankind groped and stumbled through an impenetrable darkness, to and fro, back and forth, and round and round, as one after another, this god and that were tried on and sported about like some spiffy new garment.

"Ooh!" they would say, "this one fits me perfectly. This must be the one true god. You too will wear this god since it must fit you perfectly, too." But, time and circumstance in most instances has watched those perfect fitting gods die off. Man's past was home to tens of thousands of gods, and a thousand perfect fits are imagined yet today.

But, the perfect fitting gods, including those imagined today, have never provided anything tangible for living persons, with exception for those persons making the money, of course. When man began to understand that gods offer no revelations or insights or power, and thus could be completely ignored from an explanatory standpoint, while still prudently tiptoeing around the authoritarian clergy -- beware the religious man with the small mind, the noose, and the willingness and power to use them -- he was then prepared to seek and find his ultimate ancestor: nature itself.

No longer shackled to the debilitating inanity of gods, man came to recognize nature as the source of life and so could begin to query nature itself - the actual creator of the universe - for insights about ourselves and this universe we inhabit. Asking the right question is always important, but no less important is posing the question to the appropriate authority or expert. Since gods are imaginary products of human creativity (that's one reason man has had so many of them), they have never created anything, all of nature included, and anything attributed to gods is simply more human imagining. No gods have ever been smarter than the humans breathing life into them. So, man stopped pretending that gods were giving answers and started asking the questions of the rightful authority, nature. The consequences of putting the questions to the real expert has been overwhelmingly successful. By asking of nature rather than imaginary gods, what we have come to know as useful and reliable exceeds the capacity of any of us to know anything beyond a minuscule portion of it.

Millenia of imaginary godly insights gave us nothing worthwhile, hardly more than bareknuckle barbarism. A few centuries of that shared dialogue with nature we call science has significantly enhanced both the quality and quantity of life that one can expect. Science has elevated us morally, socially, and economically. We now probe the depths of the extremes of small and large. We have thrown off so many of the blatantly wrong god-attributed intuitions about ourselves and how we fit into the grand scheme of things. We now understand that the self-serving utterings of clerics which have oppressed so many through the ages can be ignored without fear of a god's wrath-filled retribution. We know the comforting lies perpetuated by religions and how religions prop up their superstitions of prayers and miracles with the ignorance science labors so arduously to eradicate.

The fish in the picture is related to us all, and that relationship, made clear by science, serves as part of the proof that we living things are 100 percent supernatural-free phenomena.

FWIW, the hands this fish has aren't related to the hands that we have. The fish with the closest analogue would be the lobe fins of the coelacanth. The hands of a handfish are sure interesting and neat to look at but they have little to do with tetrapod limbs or hands.

According to evolution, this would have to be convergent evolution - which can never really be a defence of evolution. Convergent evolution says these fish just happened to evolve hands completely sepereately from the evolution that led to hands in land animals. So that fish are found with hands is only an issue for evolution.

Well of course it's only a problem for evolution - Creationism by a sufficiently deranged and incompetent creator can explain everything so nothing is ever a problem. What is the rabbit-in-the-cretaceous for Creationism, something which could possibly ever be a problem? (Of course I mean what could be a problem to the believers - everyone else knows there are so many problems that it's errant nonsense.)

And on the subject of convergent evolution, the handfish are very closely related to angler fish who form lures from various parts of their bodies. What's interesting is that this strategy is adopted by several species but the lures are all formed from very different parts of their bodies. Again, this makes perfect sense when you understand that evolution does not have a direction or goal but relies on chance mutations or on co-opting existing features in new ways.

It makes absolutely no sense if you imagine there's a designer because similar goals are achieved in radically different ways. There's commonalities between species which we're told is a mark of a designer sharing designs but this is bullshit as we see here, the sharing is based solely on a (imagined to be "false") evolutionary tree, an there's absolutely no sharing based on function. Compare this with genuine design - ABS brakes and airbags, once discovered are quickly spread across all cars regardless of make or model. They're all mounted in a similar fashion, often coming from the same factories. What we never see is an airbag appearing as an outgrowth of a steering-wheel horn in a Ford, nothing in Honda and overgrown fuzzy dice acting like an air-bag in Toyotas. That would be ludicrous, but it's what we see in animals.

Anglerfish and the handfish are a perfect example - the hands are very different structurally from any tetrapod hand despite some similar functions and tetrapods who return to the water still have tetrapod limbs even where true fins would help (eg: whales, marine lizards, penguins, seals, etc.).

Convergent evolution is what we expect to see under evolution; shared traits to accomplish specific goals or niches is what we expect to see if organisms were designed. What *do* we see, hmmm?